To Work or Not?

Although there's a certain intuitive logic to the study results—take a privileged mom out of the home, and some of the privileges leave with her—there's little reason for affluent working mothers to panic. The study is one in a long line; other surveys have found positive effects, negative effects and no effects when moms work. It's hard to trust any one set of results, says Thomas Cottle, a clinical psychologist at Boston University's School of Education. "This is not the natural sciences, where we can replicate things," he says. "If you're of a particular ideology, you're going to say about any given study, 'I don't want to believe this'."

There are certainly ways to pick apart Ruhm's results. While the study is well designed, it's missing some data, including one big part of the equation. The statistics he analyzed didn't provide much information on who was taking care of the kids while their mothers worked: whether there were stay-at-home dads or other family caregivers around, whether the household employed a nanny, whether the child went to day care and, if so, how good that day care was. "The overall quality of the care, as indicated using national standards, is the key factor affecting child outcomes in terms of learning and social behavior," says Vivian Carlson, a professor of family studies at Saint Joseph College in Connecticut. "The major flaw here is that the study doesn't look at the type or the quality of the care, so I would find these results rather meaningless." Ruhm himself admits that the care factor is a big one, even for school-aged kids who don't need someone to keep an eye on them every minute: "As we get to older kids, are we looking at after-school care versus being a latchkey kid? That could make a huge difference."

But it's not really fair to blame Ruhm for those missing numbers, since he didn't collect the data himself. (His analysis is based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a long-running Department of Labor survey that is updated every two years; its parenting data are more comprehensive for women than they are for men.) And give him credit: he did try to find out what effects the presence of stay-at-home dads would have on kids. The problem was, there just weren't enough stay-at-home dads to study.

The upshot of this research, he says, is absolutely not that high-status women should stay out of the office: it's that parents of both genders need more support in their efforts to balance their lives. "I don't think it's realistic or desirable to go back to the 1950s," he says. "And I don't believe this is exclusively related to mothers. This is fundamentally a question of how we balance the needs of work and family. My personal take-home message is that we really need to think about policies to help with work-family balance, and the U.S. is certainly not a leader in that regard." Unfortunately, that's something every parent—working or stay-at-home—can probably agree on.

© 2008